This review may contain spoilers
If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning, I'd hammer in the evening, all over this land
Drawing inspiration from a Hollywood-style premise that flirts with decidedly captivating classic genre archetypes — the marriage thriller, the suspect husband, the kidnapped wife and an invisible killer — “The Husband” builds tension through a gradual accumulation of elements, in what appears to all intents and purposes to be a descent into the gothic-crime genre that is sure to captivate, laying excellent groundwork and fuelling ever-higher expectations.
However, just when the viewer seems to have grasped the parameters within which the story intends to unfold, the series takes a sharp turn, transforming what appeared to be a gradual evolution of the thriller into a substantial replacement of it.
What might have taken the form of a narrative metamorphosis — A becoming B without ceasing to be A — instead gradually takes on the contours of a rupture: the marriage and crime thriller of the first part gives way to a medical-scientific conspiracy that does not seem to fit organically within the initial premise, nor does it succeed in retrospectively lending it a deeper meaning.
A rupture that appears all the more pronounced precisely because the first part of the drama perfectly illustrates the narrative framework that the series had outlined with equal rigour;
Through a cohesiveness that is more than mere appearance, “The Husband” exploits and expands upon – whilst redefining them within the conventions of television – the three unities of classical drama, beginning with the action in which the protagonist, Tae-ju, is determined to find and rescue Se-yun whilst, at the same time, proving that he is not responsible for her abduction; inevitably linked to time, through the ransom countdown and the constant threat of Se-yun’s death – elements that imbue the narrative with a frenetically gripping pace; finally arriving at the unity of place, where the house, Se-yun’s prison, even the hospital and the car delineate the microcosm within which the desperate hunt unfolds.
Within this narrative puzzle, the portrayals of the characters — Tae-ju, Se-yun, Man-hui, the police, the parents, Su-hyeong — all serve this conflict, alongside all the narrative elements that help the viewer immerse themselves in the whirlwind of hypotheses that the story inevitably provokes.
It is therefore within such precise narrative parameters that the viewer is gradually led to formulate their own questions, building expectations consistent with what the series has shown them up to that point.
And this is the point at which “The Husband” makes its most problematic choice: rather than developing those premises organically, it begins to shift the narrative’s focus towards a completely different subject matter...
The first sign of the plot’s fragility emerges as early as when the series introduces characters and situations that appear destined to deepen the mystery, but which ultimately turn out to be mere plot devices.
Su-hyeong, a former police officer and a sort of maverick driven by revenge, embodies a whole series of elements that could potentially be crucial to the story’s progression: he has a previous case, he has lost his wife, he has studied the kidnapper’s modus operandi, he possesses information the police do not have, and he knows another victim; yet his role is exhausted almost immediately, without him being accorded the narrative weight that his introduction seemed to promise, effectively reducing him to a plot device serving the protagonist’s sensational escape.
The same mechanism is repeated, on a smaller scale, in the subplot involving the nurse’s grandmother, who is kidnapped and used by Man-hui as leverage to extract information from the hospital – a subplot introduced with sufficient emphasis but quickly absorbed and abandoned by the narrative.
It is, however, particularly as the story progresses that this mechanism takes on more pronounced proportions, because it is not merely that certain plot threads are abandoned: the very nature of the narrative gradually changes.
The action and survival thriller gives way to a hospital-based conspiracy linked to stem cell research, with the focus shifting from the kidnapping and the hunt for the killer towards a web of vested interests, blackmail, murders and repressed emotions involving doctors, patients and their families. The problem is not, once again, the ambition to broaden the scope, but the lack of a transition capable of making this new scenario feel like the natural consequence of what had gone before.
This same shift gradually extends to the characterisation. From the very first episodes, Man-hui demonstrates that he employs technology, surveillance and planning with such systematic rigour that he is constantly one step ahead of anyone attempting to stop him; what changes, therefore, is not so much his nature as the increasingly evident disparity between his ability to anticipate every move and that of a clumsy investigative apparatus that seems perpetually to be chasing him after the fact.
His characterisation thus ends up oscillating between that of a brutal serial killer – who resorts to mallets, hammers and stones with often impulsive violence – and that of an almost infallible criminal capable of devising extremely sophisticated plans, a combination that the screenplay does not always manage to render fully coherent. Crosses, rituals, an hourglass and Little Red Riding Hood seem to belong to a killer with his own ritualistic conception of violence; at the same time, however, the second half asks us to view him as a highly sophisticated strategist of intrigue.
Man-hui and Gyeong-ae are gradually absorbed by the demands of the plot, whilst the complexity of their relationship remains only partially explored.
From that moment on, everything seems to operate according to different rules: the police – running like headless chickens – continue to chase without ever getting ahead of the game, whilst a surgeon almost incidentally takes on investigative duties, the hospital is transformed into a microcosm of rivalries, secrets, crimes and repressed emotions, whilst Se-yun herself, after being kidnapped, tortured, recaptured and finally freed, is left exposed to further dangers with protection that, paradoxically, appears far more fragile than that afforded to the wife of her own tormentor.
It is at this point that the viewer’s sense of disorientation becomes more than just a simple shift in tone: the series seems to have reversed its trajectory without laying the groundwork necessary to make that turn.
It is not, therefore, a question of expecting every detail to be explained or of insisting that a thriller must adhere slavishly to the conventions of the genre; it is a matter of recognising a narrative progression and verifying its internal consistency. In “The Husband”, however, intentions, premises and developments often seem to proceed on different levels, to the extent that certain plot twists are not merely implausible, but difficult to reconcile with the logic previously established.
In many series, the problem arises in the final episodes: a rushed conclusion, an unconvincing resolution, an ending that fails to live up to its promise. Here, the issue is more radically: the fracture occurs at the very heart of the narrative, retroactively altering our perception of what comes next and, to some extent, of what has come before.
‘The Husband’ thus ends up feeling like a drama that is progressively split into two narrative identities that are difficult to reconcile.
This is perhaps the main reason for my disappointment: not that I am faced with a story devoid of ideas, but with one that contains far too many and which, instead of organising them into a coherent whole, ends up simplifying and trivialising them.
And yet, amidst the muddled plot development, there was a story. Perhaps even a far more interesting one than the one the series chose to overload with conspiracies: the one suggested by the title itself, through the possible parallels between the two families – Tae-ju and Se-yun on the one hand, Man-hui and Gyeong-ae on the other...
Two profoundly different couples, even irreconcilable on a moral level, yet united by the same notion of marital devotion, taken to the point of self-sacrifice. Tae-ju goes so far as to put his own identity, and ultimately his marriage, on the line in order to protect Se-yun; Man-hui, having shared with Gyeong-ae a guilt that will become the very foundation of their relationship, in turn chooses to take full responsibility to save her.
One attempts to protect his wife without losing himself entirely; the other, having already crossed that threshold, transforms his sacrifice into a final act of protection. An imperfect symmetry – morally irreconcilable yet narratively evocative – which could have elevated “The Husband” to something far deeper than a mere crime thriller.
The drama could have been a real gem: it has the premise, the atmosphere, the characters and even thematic parallels capable of sustaining it. But the writing ends up squandering exactly what had made the opening so promising, gradually replacing structure with a mere accumulation of events and causality with the need to drive the plot forward. This is perhaps its most bitter contradiction: having enough material to build a memorable story, yet ending up simplifying it, trivialising it and fragmenting it.
A story may deliberately leave something unresolved; what it cannot do without paying a price is to invest time, information, motivations and relationships in building up its premises, only to transform them – once their immediate function has been fulfilled – into mere tools for advancing the plot. For every narrative element to which significance is attached inevitably ends up creating an expectation, and that promise, sooner or later, demands to be fulfilled.
5/10
However, just when the viewer seems to have grasped the parameters within which the story intends to unfold, the series takes a sharp turn, transforming what appeared to be a gradual evolution of the thriller into a substantial replacement of it.
What might have taken the form of a narrative metamorphosis — A becoming B without ceasing to be A — instead gradually takes on the contours of a rupture: the marriage and crime thriller of the first part gives way to a medical-scientific conspiracy that does not seem to fit organically within the initial premise, nor does it succeed in retrospectively lending it a deeper meaning.
A rupture that appears all the more pronounced precisely because the first part of the drama perfectly illustrates the narrative framework that the series had outlined with equal rigour;
Through a cohesiveness that is more than mere appearance, “The Husband” exploits and expands upon – whilst redefining them within the conventions of television – the three unities of classical drama, beginning with the action in which the protagonist, Tae-ju, is determined to find and rescue Se-yun whilst, at the same time, proving that he is not responsible for her abduction; inevitably linked to time, through the ransom countdown and the constant threat of Se-yun’s death – elements that imbue the narrative with a frenetically gripping pace; finally arriving at the unity of place, where the house, Se-yun’s prison, even the hospital and the car delineate the microcosm within which the desperate hunt unfolds.
Within this narrative puzzle, the portrayals of the characters — Tae-ju, Se-yun, Man-hui, the police, the parents, Su-hyeong — all serve this conflict, alongside all the narrative elements that help the viewer immerse themselves in the whirlwind of hypotheses that the story inevitably provokes.
It is therefore within such precise narrative parameters that the viewer is gradually led to formulate their own questions, building expectations consistent with what the series has shown them up to that point.
And this is the point at which “The Husband” makes its most problematic choice: rather than developing those premises organically, it begins to shift the narrative’s focus towards a completely different subject matter...
The first sign of the plot’s fragility emerges as early as when the series introduces characters and situations that appear destined to deepen the mystery, but which ultimately turn out to be mere plot devices.
Su-hyeong, a former police officer and a sort of maverick driven by revenge, embodies a whole series of elements that could potentially be crucial to the story’s progression: he has a previous case, he has lost his wife, he has studied the kidnapper’s modus operandi, he possesses information the police do not have, and he knows another victim; yet his role is exhausted almost immediately, without him being accorded the narrative weight that his introduction seemed to promise, effectively reducing him to a plot device serving the protagonist’s sensational escape.
The same mechanism is repeated, on a smaller scale, in the subplot involving the nurse’s grandmother, who is kidnapped and used by Man-hui as leverage to extract information from the hospital – a subplot introduced with sufficient emphasis but quickly absorbed and abandoned by the narrative.
It is, however, particularly as the story progresses that this mechanism takes on more pronounced proportions, because it is not merely that certain plot threads are abandoned: the very nature of the narrative gradually changes.
The action and survival thriller gives way to a hospital-based conspiracy linked to stem cell research, with the focus shifting from the kidnapping and the hunt for the killer towards a web of vested interests, blackmail, murders and repressed emotions involving doctors, patients and their families. The problem is not, once again, the ambition to broaden the scope, but the lack of a transition capable of making this new scenario feel like the natural consequence of what had gone before.
This same shift gradually extends to the characterisation. From the very first episodes, Man-hui demonstrates that he employs technology, surveillance and planning with such systematic rigour that he is constantly one step ahead of anyone attempting to stop him; what changes, therefore, is not so much his nature as the increasingly evident disparity between his ability to anticipate every move and that of a clumsy investigative apparatus that seems perpetually to be chasing him after the fact.
His characterisation thus ends up oscillating between that of a brutal serial killer – who resorts to mallets, hammers and stones with often impulsive violence – and that of an almost infallible criminal capable of devising extremely sophisticated plans, a combination that the screenplay does not always manage to render fully coherent. Crosses, rituals, an hourglass and Little Red Riding Hood seem to belong to a killer with his own ritualistic conception of violence; at the same time, however, the second half asks us to view him as a highly sophisticated strategist of intrigue.
Man-hui and Gyeong-ae are gradually absorbed by the demands of the plot, whilst the complexity of their relationship remains only partially explored.
From that moment on, everything seems to operate according to different rules: the police – running like headless chickens – continue to chase without ever getting ahead of the game, whilst a surgeon almost incidentally takes on investigative duties, the hospital is transformed into a microcosm of rivalries, secrets, crimes and repressed emotions, whilst Se-yun herself, after being kidnapped, tortured, recaptured and finally freed, is left exposed to further dangers with protection that, paradoxically, appears far more fragile than that afforded to the wife of her own tormentor.
It is at this point that the viewer’s sense of disorientation becomes more than just a simple shift in tone: the series seems to have reversed its trajectory without laying the groundwork necessary to make that turn.
It is not, therefore, a question of expecting every detail to be explained or of insisting that a thriller must adhere slavishly to the conventions of the genre; it is a matter of recognising a narrative progression and verifying its internal consistency. In “The Husband”, however, intentions, premises and developments often seem to proceed on different levels, to the extent that certain plot twists are not merely implausible, but difficult to reconcile with the logic previously established.
In many series, the problem arises in the final episodes: a rushed conclusion, an unconvincing resolution, an ending that fails to live up to its promise. Here, the issue is more radically: the fracture occurs at the very heart of the narrative, retroactively altering our perception of what comes next and, to some extent, of what has come before.
‘The Husband’ thus ends up feeling like a drama that is progressively split into two narrative identities that are difficult to reconcile.
This is perhaps the main reason for my disappointment: not that I am faced with a story devoid of ideas, but with one that contains far too many and which, instead of organising them into a coherent whole, ends up simplifying and trivialising them.
And yet, amidst the muddled plot development, there was a story. Perhaps even a far more interesting one than the one the series chose to overload with conspiracies: the one suggested by the title itself, through the possible parallels between the two families – Tae-ju and Se-yun on the one hand, Man-hui and Gyeong-ae on the other...
Two profoundly different couples, even irreconcilable on a moral level, yet united by the same notion of marital devotion, taken to the point of self-sacrifice. Tae-ju goes so far as to put his own identity, and ultimately his marriage, on the line in order to protect Se-yun; Man-hui, having shared with Gyeong-ae a guilt that will become the very foundation of their relationship, in turn chooses to take full responsibility to save her.
One attempts to protect his wife without losing himself entirely; the other, having already crossed that threshold, transforms his sacrifice into a final act of protection. An imperfect symmetry – morally irreconcilable yet narratively evocative – which could have elevated “The Husband” to something far deeper than a mere crime thriller.
The drama could have been a real gem: it has the premise, the atmosphere, the characters and even thematic parallels capable of sustaining it. But the writing ends up squandering exactly what had made the opening so promising, gradually replacing structure with a mere accumulation of events and causality with the need to drive the plot forward. This is perhaps its most bitter contradiction: having enough material to build a memorable story, yet ending up simplifying it, trivialising it and fragmenting it.
A story may deliberately leave something unresolved; what it cannot do without paying a price is to invest time, information, motivations and relationships in building up its premises, only to transform them – once their immediate function has been fulfilled – into mere tools for advancing the plot. For every narrative element to which significance is attached inevitably ends up creating an expectation, and that promise, sooner or later, demands to be fulfilled.
5/10
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